Shea in Ghana

A woman processing shea over open fire. Please consider making a donation to protect the health, improve the incomes, and improve the lives of women in Ghana.

This holiday season, InStove is launching our most ambitious intervention ever to help communities escape poverty, protect fragile ecosystems in Africa and improve the health of women and young girls. With your help, we can impact over 1 million lives within the next few years. But it all comes down to your support, right now...

With Shea

Shea grows in the Sahel in Africa where traditionally, it is harvested and processed by women and young girls.
These women and young girls:

Gather shea in large, heavy bags which they carry for miles at a time,

Experience drudgery and risks that include snake-bites, injuries, and gender-based violence, and

Process the shea on open fires which expose them to burns, blindness, and other illnesses.

Processing shea consumes unsustainable amounts of wood from some of the most vulnerable ecosystems in the world, and the product, dry dehusked shea nuts are sold for pennies on the pound to middlemen who process it further and sell it for dollars per pound to foreign buyers.

It is an economic cycle that cuts poor women and young girls out, and which harms their health, their environment, and their communities.

Fortunately, in Ghana, a cooperative model is emerging where women band together, and escape from this cycle of poverty with the help of InStove.

InStove now has a partnership in Ghana with Winrock International, that could soon improve the lives of over 1 million women. But, we need your help!

With $25,000: we can fill a container with stoves that will help hundreds of women across dozens of cooperatives in Ghana to protect their health, livelihoods, and environment;

With $50,000: we can do this PLUS hire an in-country program officer to help us lay the groundwork for local production.

If you have long been a subscriber, then you know we do not ask often for support. But, never before has InStove had such a clear path to achieving every best outcome:

• improving the lives of women and children,
• protecting the climate and environment, and
• empowering communities to build InStoves for themselves.

This holiday season, I hope that you will reach deep into your heart and support InStove in this ambitious project to improve, forever, the lives of over a million poor women.